Are your laundry and toys out of control? Follow these simple Deep Clean Laundry Room and Toy Room checklists to whip these areas into shape in no time!
I know it seems a little random to group these two rooms together, but I do it for 2 reasons:
- I store most of our not-regularly-used items in these two rooms
- These are the only areas of the house left in my deep cleaning rotation
Let’s talk about these two areas separately:
Laundry Room
I love a clean, yet simple laundry room. We use our laundry room EVERY DAY with our awesome laundry system. In the laundry room, I like everything to be easy to find. I have been teaching my oldest to do laundry, so keeping things as simple as possible is key. I love that I have a 9 year old that is fully capable of doing all the laundry! Right now she does 1 load a week, but if we get in a pinch after the baby comes, no biggie!
What I Store in the Laundry Room:
- extra laundry supplies: soap, stain remover (I make my own laundry soap and laundry whitener)
- carpet cleaner and other more toxic chemicals that I don’t want the kids to use
- out of season specialty clothes: swimming and snow gear
- clothing kids have recently grown out of that need to be sorted and stored
As you can see, this room is heavily utilized. There is a great little nook behind the door that I use to store the totes of specialty clothes.
Toy Room
The Toy Dilemma:
I have yet to find the perfect system for toys. If you have ideas, PLEASE comment below!!! Here is where we are at in the toy room dilemma: Over the past 6 months since my ‘minimalism’ or ‘simplifying’ journey began, we have gotten rid of nearly half our toys. We have narrowed our toys down to the following: trains, blocks, legos (big and small), dress ups, baby dolls, kitchen set and food toys, barbies, tinker toys, cars, and some little animal and people figurines. Whew, just typing that out makes me realize just how much there still is!
These toys were the ones that encouraged open-ended play, and that I noticed my kids played with the most. We donated over half the dress ups so they fit in one bin, some of the many baby dolls we had, and any other random toys that didn’t really do anything. We also sorted everything into small bins with lids. This helped not only contain the toys, but contain the amount of the toys in each category.
Somehow even with all of this organization, there is still a mess. I have tried rotating the toys out, cleaning up the toys myself and having the kids earn them back, etc. Nothing really seems to work. I don’t have much room to store the toys in time out or in a holding place to be rotated. I hesitate to get rid of more, because I do feel that most of these toys are quality and imagination-building toys. We even brainstormed with the kids recently and they haven’t followed through on their own ideas…
So please, any ideas would be great.
What I Store in the Toy Room:
There is a very large closet in our loft that we use as a toy room. It is seriously enormous! This is where we store all of the clothes that a kid isn’t going to be growing into any time soon. We also store kids coats and shoes to grow into, and some totes of memorabilia and other things that we have filed away. The KonMari part of me screams to get rid of it, but not all of it is mine, so I can’t just toss it all. I sorted through my memorabilia stuff recently and still have quite a bit. I was a journal keeping young adult. There are 2 boxes of journals and scrapbooks that I kept. The eventual goal is to scan them in and keep it digitally, but that is a project for another time of life when I don’t have to worry about little hands destroying things that are important to me while they wait to be scanned.
Wow, that was a little long-winded. Anyway, here is the deep cleaning list for these areas of the home.
Deep Cleaning Laundry Room and Toy Room Checklist:
Get your free printable here!
Happy Cleaning!
How do you keep your toy room clean?
